Thatcher never kept a diary, but the archive includes rich details of her role in important domestic and world events. Margaret has spent her life fighting for social justice and equality. Thatcher became a supremely self-confident leader. When she walked into Downing Street promising harmony instead of discord, only one in seven children was poor and Britain was more equal than at any time in modern history. Among them was loyalist Brian Nelson, a former British soldier and member of the Ulster Defence Association. The poll-tax rioters. "I thought I'd be overjoyed, but really it's just another one bites the dust " This demonstrates, I suppose, that if you opposed Thatcher's ideas it was likely because of their lack of compassion, which is really just a word for love. The fact that the Thatcher question even gets asked confirms vividly just what an upas tree she remains for Scottish Toryism. Born: 21 June 1932 in Halifax. Creative destruction was capitalism's necessary agent, so equilibrium was bound to be restored. I was on my own. Tim Bale, author of The Conservative Party: from Thatcher to Cameron, says it was conviction. Thatcher has said that negotiation, and not strong economic sanctions, is the way to persuade South Africa's white-minority government to dismantle apartheid. All can agree that Margaret Thatcher changed the heart of British politics more than any politician since Clement Attlee. When Heath fell, her promoters ran her as a stalking horse because, as a woman, they thought she could not win. It never was. Those strikes were confusing to me as a child. Many are children of the Thatcher age. Now it was the turn of the words, and no one, of course, would, against all the odds, do them better than the lady who, 25 years before, once thought the sky was beyond her limit. Reagan's decision to bomb Libya in April 1986 and spoke What you see is a nation ruled for 11 turbulent years by a remarkable woman and which still lives in her image. North sea oil was squandered when it should have seeded new industries. When Margaret Thatcher won the general election in 1979, she became Prime Minister of a land in chaos. Perhaps Labour would benefit from another defeat, given the danger of taking power unprepared and turning into a zombie government, like the tragedy unfurling in France. Any attempts at revisionism do no favours to her, women or feminism. When Sir Geoffrey Howe resigned in consequence, she replied Thatcher did not believe in "picking winners"; instead she preferred to rely on market forces to ensure the survival of the fittest. Here, for instance, was what the Guardian reported upon the death last month of Hugo Chavez: "To the millions who detested him as a thug and charlatan, it will be occasion to bid, vocally or discreetly, good riddance.". with concern about global warming, having done more than any other politician And then, perversely, would come the throwaway, sign-off remark to the effect of: "At least you know where you stand with Maggie she hates us and we hate her.". She and her successors John Major and Tony Blair presided over a quarter century of unprecedented prosperity. She gave it her best shot. in his defence during the IranContra affair later that year.. Elected for a third term in June 1987, she told But she also provided great material. In her diminished presence I stared like an amateur astronomer unable to describe my awe at this distant phenomenon. The spell of community. In short, miners believed in society. It still does. From the invention of the term "sado-monetarism" through to the way her powerful ministers seemed to swoon before her, and the constant negative reiteration by her critics of her femininity, or lack of it, she exerted a glacial hold over the (male) nation's masochistic imagination. September 25, 2020. As David Wearing put it this morning in satirizing these speak-no-ill-of-the-deceased moralists: "People praising Thatcher's legacy should show some respect for her victims. Where once we stood within a recognisable postwar social democratic European tradition, after Thatcher the country had rowed halfway across the Atlantic, psychologically imbued with US neoliberal individualism. Her centralism, unequalled in Europe, descended under Blair into a morass of targetry, inefficiency and endless reorganisation. They built and provided their own welfare facilities and, well before today's welfare state was built, miners created their own welfare systems to alleviate hardship. As the coalition sets about shrinking the welfare state, it's still embarked on Thatcher's project of rolling back the frontiers of the state, dismantling the settlement that held from 1945 until it unravelled in the 1970s. Under this heading, Thatcher left a dark legacy that, like her successes, has still not disappeared behind the historical horizon. Symbolically, the key moment was the defeat of the miners after the year-long pit strike in March 1985. Thatcher's most baleful influence on government was not on industries and services she privatised but those she did not. Larkin's evoked the treacherous mind (of an adversary, of a cabinet colleague) helplessly exposed to her steely regard. But at its crudest, the Thatcher ethos translated into the get-rich-quick, greed-is-good spirit of the 1980s, satirised by Harry Enfield's Loadsamoney creation. It is not true that Thatcher didn't care about the media. So it suggests the anachronistic and unaffordable return to a contributory welfare system, while opposing the further opening up of education and health provision; some even float the renationalisation of railways. "Labour is stuck because they do not want to carry on the slimming down of the state and devolution of power but nor do they really want to reverse it," said one central Tory figure. The government's welfare bill has been swollen by tax credits and housing benefit caused by the labour market reforms and council house sales of the 1980s. The price we all continue to pay for Thatcherite policies is to live in a less cohesive and more antisocial society, in which community life is weaker, people feel less able to trust each other and fewer of those in government have the experience and compassion to represent or understand the vast majority. Though the Prime Minister was known to shed a tear or two during her 11 years leading the United Kingdom . The poll tax showed the opposite, the weakness of Thatcher's strength. If you have a . The real comic nemeses of Thatcher were the puppets of Spitting Image. Then they discovered that they could make money, so they dropped all that. The first time I met Margaret Thatcher, I swear she was wearing gloves. As far as her supporters are concerned, this radical transformation worked. People should pay her the respect of doing the same after her death. She became leader of the Conservatives the year I was born and prime minister when I was four. By then, 1990, I was 15, adolescent and instinctively anti-establishment enough to regard her disdainfully. But growth rates in the decades since her period in office have been lower than during those that preceded her; nor does the balance of research evidence suggest that greater inequality acts as a spur to growth. After all, the right began to refocus only after Tony Blair's second landslide, when people began to recognise they would not drift back into power. . Alamat kami. Eventually, the Italian contingent, largely existential or postmodern, rose up against us. Viewed from today, that past Britain is indeed a foreign country. Thatcher understood the connection between the social wage and workers' wages better than most unions. "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.". That gives them the nerve to set about cutting benefits and the public realm with a glee they don't bother to hide. During Margaret Thatcher's rise to the top, he was one of the backroom figures whose words helped create her reputation as the Iron Lady. She was 87. for turning. Conscious of being awoman, and incapable of pretending otherwise. Margaret Thatcher's landmark Bruges speech about the future of Europe was never intended to push the UK towards the exit, the man who wrote it says. Instead state assets and a huge income stream from North sea oil were used to fund a populist programme of tax cuts, privatisation and council housesales. Ingham's rough redraft of my speech with very little success. A senior civil servant said, "It worked because we all knew exactly what she wanted.". It knew what Thatcher wanted. To Britons of my generation, she . It isn't sad for anyone else. She would, say some who knew her, have a found a way to finesse a change of direction by now. Margaret Thatcher's most important long-term legacy is likely to be the huge rise in inequality that she caused. Her political antennae refused to allow her to privatise the coal industry, British Rail or the post office. On Sunday, looking down at the waterfront, I could see how these had been replaced by a housing estate, a supermarket, and sometimes by nothing at all. Since 1990 a selection of statements is listed. "Being powerful is like being a lady. You could never call Margaret Mother by mistake. The left misleads us and maybe itself when it says that Thatcher's policies, extended by New Labour and then by the coalition, have failed. She became harder than hard. While "one nation" Conservatives condone some forms of redistribution, their libertarian . Ithink on balance, it was for the better, and so, plainly did Thatcher's chief successor, Tony Blair. A special licence was granted exclusively to the Radio Times. series of famous statements that marked the end of her premiership, replied Whatever Tory historians like to claim, this was the critical turning point. Thatcher and Reagan went on to facilitate a colossal transfer of wealth from poor to rich, leading to the world economic crash we now witness. As a child she unnerved me but we are not children now and we are free to choose our own ethical codes and leaders that reflect them. The first three speeches were by Winston Churchill. she Full employment had been ditched in 1976, while Labour had introduced monetary targets and cash limits for Whitehall departments while Denis Healey was at the Treasury. Government will respond to clear leadership if it knows what a leader wants. But there were also cuts for basic-rate taxpayers: the 1988 budget, for example, cut the top rate of tax from 60% to 40% and the standard rate from 27% to 25%. There is a paradox. She led Britain further into Europe, while talking us further out. She was propped up by police who were encouraged to brutality against not only strikers but communities of colour, already hardest hit by unemployment: police powers were enhanced and their racism given free rein, especially with stop and search; CS gas was used on the mainland for the first time. We can't blame (or credit) her for all of this, of course. Thatcher's reign helped to inspire alternative comedy by creating a generation so bereft of hope that they started putting on gigs just for the sake of something to do. And we won back three we lost at by-elections. It was a Charles I moment in British history. In November 1978, Hannaford and I organized a European fact-finding tour for Reagan, and the first stop was London. In this moment she inspired only curiosity, a pale phantom, dumbly filling her day. That's history, but what matters to us is her legacy now that her heirs and imitators rule in her wake. It was not yours, but belonged to the Post Office: in effect, the government. Above all has been the hollowing out of the labour market. To the extent that there was an industrial strategy, it was to sell Britain as a destination for Japanese car companies and to shift the focus of the economy away from manufacturing towards financial services. Oil helped Thatcher paper over the cracks, but Britain's age-old problem finding a way to pay its way in the world remains. Maggie and Me: How Thatcher Changed Britain. Everything was justified as long as it made money andthis, too, isstill with us. She adopts an endearing and sentimental tone using ethos, repetition, and . Speaking personally, it was a personal privilege beyond measure to have witnessed and participate in the blossoming of the special ties that continued throughout her entire time in office. The great contradiction in her politics was that someone who yearned for the certainties of small-town shopkeeper economics helped create the amoral yuppiedom of 80s excess and an explosion of cultural resistance that is still an ironic positive legacy of her time in power. Sent Bobby Sands to an Irish hero's grave without a blink. The south of England and the City of London were the future; the revenues from North Sea oil would pay for the unemployed in the old zones of manufacturing industry. John Major, the "detoxification" successor, was fated to implement many of her unattempted reforms. The challenge for the left is to fashion new and genuinely progressive policies in an age of austerity, when more money is not the answer to any question. This regrettable transformation was blessed by a leader who probably did not know it was happening because she didn't care if it happened or not. But this didn't come without a price. Gaze at the telephone. Meanwhile, you struggle to identify deep thinkers in party ranks beyond a couple of veteran stalwarts; even the left's thinktanks appear moribund or merely harking back to an idealised past. The impact that Hayek's writing had on Thatcher, her advisors, and her policies is undeniable. Yet, at that last encounter, her tone was different. one recommended by Simon Heffer. More than once the view was advanced that it was a pity the IRA had not succeeded in their ultimate objective when they bombed the Grand Hotel in Brighton. Sir Bernard Ingham was Margaret Thatcher writ large. Farewell, indeed, Baroness Thatcher. We had had a strange relationship. That did the trick.). But Margaret Thatcher did not hesitate, and the long, substantive lunch seemed to energize both future world leaders. Queen Elizabeth is widely assumed . "Don't follow the crowd, let the crowd follow you.". The pomp and circumstance that will crown her funeral was proffered by Brown, to some shudders from his own side. This, too, we still live with. Unable to win the leadership ballot outright, she stood on the steps of The passing of Chvez is mourned by the many millions who loved him in Latin America and everywhere. Seizing her chariot's reins to drive it on recklessly, they lack her brains, experience and political skill. For miners, greed was a destructive force, not a force for good. Reagan, for one, recognized the importance of Margaret Thatcher's presence as British prime minister, but would caution any discussionpartnerthat Pope John Paul played an equally important role. steps of Downing Street on 4 May 1979. From a peak of 13 million in 1979, trade union membership had declined by 30% by 1990, and is now not much more than half what it was. Would we like her back? Lecturing me about the comprehensive schools, of which she created more than any minister before or since. That bonuses and top incomes continue to rise while the incomes of the rest of the population struggle to keep up with inflation tells us that what we needed was legislation to ensure employee representation on company boards and remuneration committees as many of our European partners have. At the time, Thatcher was the education secretary her first major political role. deeply felt eulogy, filmed in advance and relayed by video link to screens in the National Cathedral in Washington. She was among the first Western leaders to Mikhail Gorbachev, for one, learned the hard way. In 1990 Thatcher authorised the then British secretary of state Peter Brooke to reopen back-channel negotiations with republicans. There were big tax cuts for those on the highest incomes, driven by the belief that this would encourage entrepreneurship. She was unashamed about this, loathing localism and rejecting calls to diminish the "strong state". Moreover, it's hard not to see the roots of the 2008 crash in the unshackling of the City two decades earlier. The credit boom both here and in the USA may have gone against her Grantham roots but was an equally inevitable result of deregulation and the temptation of easy loans for people hungry to improve living standards. There's something distinctively creepy - in a Roman sort of way - about this mandated ritual that our political leaders must be heralded and consecrated as saints upon death. The late Benazir Bhutto later gave me much the same account. After being asked to deliver a eulogy for the late Ronald Reagan on June 11, 2004, Margaret Thatcher gave a speech about her dear friend, and highlighted his best qualities through her writing. to his resignation letter on 1 November, stated Emery Evans . After the 1987 election, Thatcher cut an increasingly isolated figure. She had left a Britain marked by private affluence and public squalor. She pointed out that she was only 10 years old when she ceased to be prime minister. She famously changed the law after Bobby Sands was elected in Fermanagh and South Tyrone. opportunities. When she returned from Paris many cabinet colleagues showed that Fourthly, policy was aimed at those who, according to the prime minister, wanted to get on in life. wrong with politics? It came very hard, getting the words and paragraphs in the right order, a task for which, she eventually admitted, she had hired some help. We have his example. Thatcher's Spitting Image puppet was different from the others; while other characters, such as Ronald Reagan and the pope, were exaggerated into fantasy versions of themselves, the rubber Maggie was just like the one who appeared on the news a stern, cold, matronly figure who had a slightly oedipal relationship with her cabinet. You knew exactly what Maggie stood for. In January 1976 she gave the Take the larger view. At an international conference in Lisbon in the late 80s, the British faction, among whom were Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Malcolm Bradbury and myself, referred back to Thatcher constantly in our presentations. Thatcher will be especially remembered for her shameful role during the epic hunger strikes of 1980 and 81. Everyone knows where they were when they heard. It's like a whimsical live-action episode of Postman Pat where his cat is craftily carved up and sold back to him. The Big Bang of City deregulation, the Tell Sid scramble for buying and selling shares, the sense that money is the highest value, wealth the greatest sign of worth all these were hallmarks of the Thatcher era in its mid-80s pomp. Watch a million words pour out today placing her anywhere from Boudicca to the wicked witch of the west. (MT gave up public And when I and several other Sinn Fin leaders were elected to the Assembly in 1982 we were barred from entry to Britain. Talk to a Labour MP and you end up discussing politics and positioning; talk to a Tory, and it tends to be about policy. For years, in fact, she despised writers, except those who did her speeches. She invited the It was part of her conspicuous virtue, her indifference to familiar political conventions. "Maggie Thatcher" two fierce trochees set against the gentler iambic pulse of Britain's postwar welfare state. They married the personality and belief to action. Look inside your own house, at the water coming out of the tap: once a public utility but, after Thatcher, the property of private companies, many foreign-owned. In the prime Thatcher years they required a severity of will to carry through that would now, if called on, bewrapped in so many cycles of deluding spin as to persuade us it hadn't really happened. It was illegal to put an extension lead on your phone. It is full of insights into a neglected aspect of how Thatcher came to dominate British politics." (Andrew Gamble, University of Sheffield, UK) "A fascinating insight into the world of speech writing. Are there, even, things we look back on with regret for their passing? Yet her understanding of Britain was alarmingly crude. But it was the killing of human rights lawyer Pat Finucane in February 1989 that reveals the depth of the Thatcher government's state collusion policy. If a leader's record is to be measured by the willingness of the other side to decide itcannot turn back the clock, then Thatcher bulks big in history. I'd unthinkingly imbibed enough doctrine to know that, troubled as I was, there was little point looking elsewhere for support. Somesay she revolutionised British politics certainly never again could people say nobody would vote for a woman but it served a reactionary end. To use a less bizarre analogy: if Thatcher was the headmistress, they were junior teachers, authoritative but warm enough that you could call them "mum" by accident. Demanding that no criticisms be voiced to counter that hagiography is to enable false history and a propagandistic whitewashing of bad acts, distortions that become quickly ossified and then endure by virtue of no opposition and the powerful emotions created by death. Second was the particular hostility towards Margaret Thatcher and her local ministerial spear-carrier, energy minister and incumbent MP of 13 years' standing, Hamish Gray. When I think of this memorial, I think of the words of Rupert Brooke, "that there's some corner of a foreign field that is forever England.". As I see it, and as one who had the pleasure of knowing both, they would recognize the huge opportunity created by the presence of each in the respective national and international policy-making role. announced that White And on the 11th June, we even won some nine seats we failed to gain in 1983. Miners were a hardy race of people who faced constant danger in the cause of mining coal but underneath that they were caring, sensitive individuals with a commitment to the communities in which they lived. This reverie only occurred when the car was out of view. Making sure the verdict wasn't purloined by others. Margaret Thatcher's most popular book is The Downing Street Years. speech to the House of Lords in June 1993. It's how she would have, if pressed, put it herself. be a nation in retreat". Its impact on the streets of the north is evident in the statistics of death. Animals and Pets Anime Art Cars and Motor Vehicles Crafts and DIY Culture, Race, and Ethnicity Ethics and Philosophy Fashion Food and Drink History Hobbies Law Learning and Education Military Movies Music Place Podcasts and Streamers Politics Programming Reading, Writing, and Literature Religion and Spirituality Science Tabletop Games . performance at a Press Conference afterwards. (Interestingly, Currie also recalled that when she approached Thatcher in 1988 to get approval for the world's first national breast-screening programme, she tried to appeal to the PM initially "as a woman" but that swiftly proved unsuccessful. Beleagured Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher makes pun during the 1981 Conservative Party conference speech: "the lady's not for turning" she says to her crit. Privatisation was the single most massive attack on democracy we have seen. He had enough Del Boy about him to admire her coiffured virility but in a way Thatcher was so omnipotent; so omnipresent, so omni-everything that all opinion was redundant. The Brixton rioters, the Argentinians, teachers; everyone actually. "The original alternative comics just did it because they had to," he says. So the woman I met in Curzon Street, dimpling elegantly, can now be seen in history with an unexpected achievement to her credit. The party she led three times to electoral triumph became unelectable for a generation. I don't see that. Secondly, the balance of power in industrial relations was shifted decisively in favour of employers. John asked a nearby chippy loading his white van. It was mostly foreigners who could not understand why she fell. A splendid synergy was created, deliberately and with just that in mind on both sides of the Atlantic. The papers date from Margaret Thatcher's childhood to the end of her life, and include tens of thousands of photographs, as well as a vast collection of press cuttings, and many audio and video tapes of public and private events. Like John Major in her wake, Thatcher was convinced that she understood the Scots yet couldn't understand why we remained so stubbornly resistant towards the notion of understanding her. There is now, however, an opportunity to commit to a new politics that learns lessons from her ambition yet undoes the damage and focuses on reconstruction. At times the Conservative party is so anarchic as to appear almost ungovernable, like a plethora of pressure groups pushing pet causes rather than a united group ruthlessly focusing on political success. A week later she spoke
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